Nicola Griffith

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:: Note ::

I wrote this humongous list of likes and dislikes after discussion on my Yahoo list about personal influences, followed by talk about wikis, and then discussion of encyclopedia entries and what should and shouldn't be included about a favourite author. In the spirit of sharing I put together this list. It's long...

I have definite tastes. Please don't write and tell me I'm a snob. I probably am (at least with food and wine; if you still think I'm a snob after you've read my film and tv preferences then, hey, we're using a different dictionary). I don't care. I like what I like. I don't have to like what you like. You don't have to like what I like. We just have to understand that mileage varies.

wine
(general prefence: old-style, structured, European reds, haughty champagnes, unoaked white quaffers for summer. I don't like American wine. Don't tell me it's just because I haven't met the right one yet; I've tried everything from Opus One to stuff made in Missouri.)
no budget:
- bordeaux: Chateau Margaux, 1977 ('83 was good, too, and '73, and...)
- champagne: Krug, 1968 (any Krug, really)
some budget
- Pauillac: Haut Batailley, 1990
- Ribera Del Duero: Cims, 1990 (? I forget the vintage exactly...)
- Barbaresco: Fontanabianca, 1996
- Bollinger (various vintages)
- various amontillados (the most exciting sherry, in my opinion)
- various Armagnacs (so much more interesting than most cognac)
- various old (forty years is good) tawny ports
- absinthe (the good stuff is expensive, but worth it, because it's not very bitter, and it's a bit like a very small hit of opium--very smoothing, but with none of the urge to giggle or eat rubbish that you get from, say, hash; and, even better, it's legal)
very reasonable budget
- champagne: Thierry Triolet
- methode ancestrale: Cerdon du Bugey (it's sweet--very nice as a summer dessert wine)
- cremant: Lucien Albrecht
- rioja: Solar Viejo Reserva, 1998
- nebbiolo: Langhe, 2004
- white bordeaux: various
- a good summer quaffer (it's a Spanish sauvignon blanc): Añoranza, 2004chocolate
(general preference: I'm old-fashioned when it comes to chocolate; bar milk chocolate is better than dark, truffles are better than any other chocolates)
- Belgian milk chocolate (just itself, in a bar, nothing in it, not infused with any new-fangled flavours)
- Butler's Irish Chocolate truffles
- Teuscher Champagne truffles
- Thornton's truffles
- Godiva truffles
beer
(general preference: bitters for winter, and pilsners for summer. I don't like American beer, and don't try to tell me it's just because I haven't met the right one yet; I've tried hundreds: I don't like it. End of story.) winter
- Fuller's ESB
- Bass
- Guinness
summer
- Oranjeboom
- Lindeboom
- Stella Artois
- Corona (but, oh, only if it's fresh--hate that skunky smell when you open the oxidised stuff)restaurant food expensive:
foie gras
beluga or sevruga caviar (don't mind the blinis-with-creme fraiche or the toast-with-chopped-egg version; love it on and in other things, too; it's all good)
duck
venison
rabbit
inexpensive:
Indian: lamb vindaloo, chicken tikka
Thai: larb, chicken and limegrass soup
Greek: roast lamb, lovely Greek potatoes
Italian: almost anything made with un-cured meat and without cheese
Mexican: steak fajitas, with guacamole instead of sour cream and cheese
American: fish (tuna, salmon, etc.)
pub food
fish and chips
shepherd's pie
restaurants (Seattle)
fine dining: Rover's, Harvest Vine (Madison Valley)
takeaway: Ta-Won Thai (Fremont), Pagliacci (various) India Cuisine (Wallingford)
pub: Murphy's (Wallingford)
home food
general preferences: whole grains (pasta, rice, bread), very fresh veggies, olive oil rather than butter for cooking, very little dairy, absolutely no cheese (give me cheese and some food colouring and I will redecorate your room) - my vegetarian chili, with homemade coleslaw and wholemeal pita bread
- Kelley's beef marrow stoup (Kelley calls it soup, I call it stew; "stoup" is our compromise)
- wholemeal bread with Danish butter (Lurpak)
- salad (mixed greens, avocado, bean sprouts, carrots, chickpeas, with our special tofu and basil dressing, yum)
- rice and oat flour banana raisin muffins
- corned beef hash
- portuguese soup (linguiça, kale, potatoes, carrots, onion, kidney beans)
- spaghetti bolognese (not from a jar, homemade)
- potato and parnsip soup (with just a hint of cream)
- roast chicken, roast lamb, roast beef, roast pork, roast...well, anything (K. always does this--I don't have much patience for baking and roasting, i.e. stuff you have to hover over; I specialise in what in our household we call sloppy glop: stews, casseroles, soups)
- brightly coloured stir-fry with brown rice
- crême brulée (K. makes this)
- chocolate cloud cake (I make this)
- pavlova (K. makes this, usually with little mandarin orange segments, drool)
- I'm not a fan of uncooked tomatoes; I like avocado but can't each much (ditto strawberries and bananas--a little goes a long way)tea and coffee
This will have to be a paragraph rather than a list because it's so contextual. In the morning and afternoons, at home, I drink Irish Breakfast tea, with a dab of 2% (semi-skimmed) milk. At night it's de-caf English Breakfast, again with milk. In both cases it's teabags made by Stash. But if we're staying at a lovely hotel e.g. the Empress in Victoria, I like drinking a big pot of proper tea i.e. made with loose leaves, Assam is nice, and Irish Breakfast blend--I don't much care for the flavoured things like Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong. Sometimes, if I'm feeling all peaceful (e.g. after yoga) I like green tea or white tea. Sometimes if I'm feeling unwell I like apple tea. After a serious meal I like a shot of espresso (I still miss smoking, and never more than after, er, fine things of the body...). Every now and again, e.g. after a particularly good lunch out somewhere, I'll have a latte (a short or a double tall, full cream milk and very definitely caff).

films
My personal preference is for films where shit blows up and people whack each other's heads off with swords. I can't be doing with Serious Films about Anguished People. - Die Hard (oh, this is a practically perfect film)
- Alien and Aliens (though they're pretty different I really like them both)
- The Lord of the Rings trilogy
- Indiana Jones films
- Spiderman II (the first was okay, but the second was better; I'll wait for #3 to hit DVD--it sounds awful)
- Superman (Christopher Reeve) I, II (the later ones were awful; I haven't seen the Routh one yet; I expect I'll like it--update: I didn't)
- X-Men II (like Spiderman, the first was okay, but the second better; I haven't seen III yet, but I will, you can be sure of that--update: and I thought it was lame)
- animated films with animals, including early Disney (the Aristocats, Jungle Book) and Pixar and Dreamworks stuff (Toystory, Ice Age, etc.), not so keen on people stuff e.g. Polar Express and Sleeping Beauty and Shrek). I'm looking forward to Cars, and Beyond the Hedge (which, it turned out, sucked)
- Galaxy Quest (this is a lovely film: funny, warm, bad guys get killed, fans are heroes, excellent)
- the early Star Wars trilogy
- some nicely done lesbian stuff: High Art, Desert Hearts, Emmanuel (softest of soft porn, so sue me; it was lovely for the teenage me)
- old Errol Flynn swashbucklers: Captain Blood, The Seahawkes, Robin Hood
- old Westerns: Shane, High Noon, Stagecouch, They Died with Their Boots On, etc.
- Sword-and-sandal epics: Spartacus, Ben Hur, Quo Vardis, etc. One day I might write a series of memoirs with titles like LIMB OF SATAN, MY NAME IS LESION, and SPASTICUS (picture a hillside at sunset, a weary army gathered around campfires...only they're all in wheelchairs. 'I'm Spasticus.' [Falls out of chair.] 'I'm Spasticus!' [falls out of chair] 'No, *I'm* Spasticus!' [falls out of chair]...etc)
- Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one; the second was a bit of a mess; I'm seeing the third one next week--update: oh, dear god, I imagine the money people love this (some of the set pieces will make excellent rides), but the emotional tone was appalling, i.e. all over the map, uh no pun intended)
- 300 (loved this, I didn't see the point of the monsters, and the oiled leather man-panties didn't do it for me, or the deformed lesbians. Also, a hint to film makers: even orgy scenes need internal logic, a story arc; I kept imagining extras just, um, starting from the top for every take, so when all the takes were edited together, the background sex made no sense; sex itself is a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. You can't just chop it to bits and expect it to make sense)

- a film I absolutely loathed:
American Beauty

- a film I found hilarious but which Kelley absolutely loathed:
Something About Mary (she saw me giggling helplessly at the cripple gags and her expression was, "I thought I knew you," and then she left the room)TV
Okay, with my TV preferences there is simply no hiding what a total geek I am.love it
- Buffy
- Firefly
- Battlestar Galactica (the Sci-Fi Channel series)
- The O.C. (first couple of seasons)
- Alien Nation
- The West Wing (they went through a boring phase, there, but then pulled it out; I'm sorry it's over)
- Star Trek: the original series and TNG
- Babylon 5 (though, oh, I could cheerfully strangle Claudia Christian for leaving and therefore screwing up the whole arc)
- Antiques Roadshow
- Heroes
- Rome (I refuse to believe that Vorenus actually died)
- Deadwood (I'm still hoping for a real ending...)
- Dexter (they're doing a fabulous job of this, can't wait to see where they go next season)
- educational programming about history (well, pre-history, ancient history, and early medievel history--basically, anything before any kind of Parliament) and science (particularly biology, psychology, anthropology and geology--never much cared about astronomy or the more abstruse reaches of chemistry or maths)

loathe it:
- any "reality TV" (oh, okay, I made an exception a few years ago for Surf Girls, because, hey, they were mostly naked most of the time; as Kelley points out, when it comes to some things I am very predictable )
- game shows
- teen series (well, I liked the first couple of years of The OC but that was because I knew there were lesbians coming up)
- The Sopranos ending infuriated me: it was lazy, uncommitted and utterly self-indulgent
- ordinary stuff (I never understood the appeal of Seinfeld or Ellen)Thirty or Forty Excellent Books
A while ago, I started talking about the Lesbian Canon with listmembers of my Yahoo group and I came to the conclusion that I don't like canons; I don't like the notion of saying, Hey, this is what has influenced lesbian culture and if you don't read these books you don't know lesbian culture. But I started thinking of good books, books that helped make me who I am, or which I'm glad I didn't miss, or which have influenced my writing in some way--a personal canon, if you like. It's mostly fiction, or at least fictionalised history and memoir, with some poetry, because although non-fiction informs me, it rarely really moves me and rarely, therefore, changes me. Included on this list, then, are only those books I've seriously enjoyed. This is definitely not po-faced educational reading (at least from my perspective). It starts with lesbian books because that's how the discussion was originally framed.• Dykes to Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel (comic strip covering close to twenty years, now, of dyke life; if you plan to read this, begin at the beginning--there are ten or more collections, I think--and you'll end up with a very clear notion of the history of a certain kind of lesbian community in the US and--with slight differences--UK)
• Patience and Sarah (earlier ..The Two of Us) by Isabel Miller (pen name of Alma Routsong), lovely romance set in 19th C. America, full of hardship and love and stubborness. I wept shamelessly (in a cathartic way) thoughout the last chapter.
• Olivia, by Olivia (real name: Dorothy Bussy), the semi-autobiographical tale of an English girl sent to a French (I think) finishing school; full of yearnings, largely unspoken and delicious
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde (yeah, memoir is non-fiction, I know, but it was my first brush with African American dykeness and I admired Lorde's clear voice)
• Fire From Heaven, by Mary Renault (real name=Mary Challons) (yeah, I know, it's about gay boys, but this is her best; Alexander and Hephaistion's relationship felt familiar and thrilling. I read this book and thought, If I could write a book as this one day, I'll know I haven't wasted my life)
• (Extra)Ordinary People (short science fiction by Joanna Russ, with what to me is probably the most fun hey-gender-is-a-game story ever)
• Orlando, by Virginia Woolf (the only fiction of Woolf's I've read and enjoyed--her non-fiction is great--the story of a woman who is a man and a woman and a man etc. and yet manages to remains her(him)self throughout)
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeannette Winterson (a first novel, and, in my opinion, her best--unselfconscious, committed, touching, funny, and full of Northern English dykeness, which I'd never seen written about at book-length before)
• A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, by Amy Bloom (short fiction about love between various people in various situations--much of it lesbian, but not all)
• The Needle on Full, Caroline Forbes (short science fiction, written very much from the late 70s/early 80s lesbian feminist milieu and extrapolated therefrom--but wrenching, in parts, and fun in others, and much better written than, er, certain US dyke sf of the time)
• The Watchtower, Elizabeth A. Lynn (fantasy, but no magic, unless you call love and aikido magic; I think this book influenced the way I write about bodies in the real world; it certainly paved the way for me to learn aikido a few years later)
• Benefits, Zoe Fairburns (this was a very scary book when I read it, in the early 80s, much scarier and more realistic than, say, The Handmaid's Tale, but less grim, too; I enjoyed the book and will reread it one day)
• Desert of the Heart, Jane Rule (this was probably the first Real Fiction by and about a lesbian that I ever read; it made me sit up and think, "Okay, this is the goal, then"--also it has a happy ending)
• Trash, Dorothy Allison (talk about emotionally naked. Wow. As I read I kept thinking, You can *do* that in fiction?? you're *allowed*?? A good lesson in the outlawry required to Really Go There in writing.)
• Moll Cutpurse, by Ellen Galford (pure fun, the story of Moll Cutpurse--rogue, dyke, slapstick humourist in the sixteenth century: there's love, gypsies, theatre, plague, and lots of high jinks--and nicely written throughout)
• Hothead Paisan, by Diane DiMassa (angry, funny, true, frightening, wicked, delicious comic book about a dyke--and her cat, Chicken--who has a caffeine-fuelled rage against the world)
• Les Guérillères, Monique Wittig (the first theory-as-fiction I'd read, and it worked--it changed my understanding of Normal and Other, and alerted me to the existence of a whole body of theoretical work I'd never suspected)
• Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy (a sexually friendly utopian novel--or not, depending on your POV; this was the first Buffy-is-really-in-the asylum novel I ever read)
• Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, a collection of science fiction stories by James Tipree Jr (aka Raccona Sheldon, real name=Alice Sheldon; some of these pieces will rip your heart out; some will make you think; some will help you see the world anew. Tiptree does love and science, dire warnings and the real world in equal measure, and she has no peer.)
• Walk to the End of the World, and Motherlines, by Suzy Mckee Charnas (all about dykes and gay boys by an ostensibly straight writer--but she gets it right. I couldn't have written AMMONITE if this book, and work by Tiptree and Le Guin and Russ, hadn't come first; it's unsettling, not to say terrible in places, but not claustrophobic like Atwood's dystopia, and a ripping good read)
• Twilight Girls, by Paula Christian (two novels about lesbian lurve in the 50s or 60s, poignant and anguished in that delicious thank-god-it's-not-me way)
• The Work of a Common Woman, by Judy Grahn (I loved the strength of this poetry, along with the acknowledgement of the possibility of frailty)
• The Dialectic of Sex, by Shulamith Firestone (non-fiction; I've no idea how relevent it would be today, it's one of the few books on this list I haven't reread, but it was an early, elegant, impassioned and intellectually rigourous--or at least appeared that way to me--headlock forcing me to pay attention to feminism and its underpinnings)
• New and Selected Poems, by Mary Oliver (she writes about nature, and her response to it, with awe that inspires awe in me; almost as good as walk in the woods)
• My Ántonia, by Willa Cather (I understood instantly that though this novel of the nineteenth century prairie was ostensibly narrated by a man it was a lesbian novel through and through; it made me yearn for...something, I still don't know what)
• Six of One, by Rita Mae Brown (this, I think, is RMB's best novel--funny (like Florence King, but without the nastiness) and mature, with a plot, and acknowledgement that not all dykes are the same)
• E.M. Forster's short fiction (yeah, gay--and pretty subtextual at that--but it felt like the things I'd felt, it meant something, and "The Machine Stops" is an excellent SF cautionary tale on the dangers of shutting out the real world)
• Sappho (I've read a zillion versions of these poetry fragments and prefer Mary Bernard's translation; good poetry is like climbing a mountain, or reaching that ecstatic part of a hymn as the sun is setting and pouring through the stained glass window: it's like understanding the entire world at once, like swallowing god)
• Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (the first novel I remember carrying even to the toilet: I wouldn't let it go until it was done; the first novel about which I remember thinking, "Now if I could do *this*...")
• Aubrey/Maturin novels, by Patrick O'Brian (the books about which I currently think, "Now if I could do *this*...", if you intend to read these, please start at the beginning with Master and Commander)
• the OED (the fount of everything)
• Kindred, by Octavia butler (this is the novel that taught me most, taught me viscerally, about race in America--and, by extension, the UK; read it)
• Sir John Masefield's poetry, various sagas, and Homer (I'm a wide-screen kinda gel, love those epics and exotics, and this is where I learnt that love)
• She, by Rider Haggard (the next step in exotic adventure, and, oh, I wanted Ayesha, I wanted her, all that power and loveliness, and she was rich, too)
• Brazzaville Beach, William Boyd (the book that taught me you could fuck with time and POV; Slow River would not exist without this novel)
• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (I read this when I was ten--most of it went over my head, of course, but when I was done I had begun to grope my way towards and understanding of History and how it worked)
• A Shortened History of England, by G. H. Trevelyan (this history was written in the 40s, way before academics got so careful they wouldn't speculate at all--it's conversational, stirring, brilliantly written and, even though I know parts of it are wrong--moulded my notion of the formation of my native land)
• The Exile Waiting, and Dreamsnake, by Vonda N. McIntyre (her first two novels, the ones that showed me real SF could have girls in and not be about romance)
• The Golden Strangers, by Henry Treece--anything by Treece, really, I just picked this one at random (his novels are set in England in times past, anything from the bronze age to the Vikings; he writes of woad and wood, mist and menhirs; he eschews the Great Man view of history for scrappy, gritty realism that, at the same time, feels majestic and mystical; from Treece I first learnt that history happened--and is happening now--to real people)
• The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart (this novel about the formation of Merlin is still one of the best historical-with-fantasy fictions I've ever read; I can smell it, see it, taste it, understand the whys and hows; fabulous)
• Asterix the Gaul, by Goscinny and Uderzo--trans. by Anthea Bell, though sometimes I read the French (hey, it's a comic, it's not hard...)
• Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (my first brush with any kind of counter-culture, read as a teenager; I loved it, though haven't seen any of it for fifteen years)music:
this is pretty random, what I've been listening to lately• massive attack
• nina hagen
• nina simone
• joni mitchell
• pj harvey
• audioslave
• led zeppelin
• curve
• tricky
• moby
• david bowie
• skunk anansie
• laura viers
• bob marley
• pink floyd
• radiohead
• chemical brothers
• annie lenox
• the cramps
• frank sinatra
• john martyn
• black rebel motorcycle club
• groove armada
• queen
• evanescence
• gomez
• paolo nutini
• lezzies on x
• radiohead
pets
• cats
• large, well-trained, smart, clean, quiet dogs (e.g. German Shepherd, Irish Wolfhound, large mutts--but if it jumps, if it yaps, if it smells, throw it in the tree-chipper)
• koi (outside, in a pond)the great outdoors
I'm English, I like countryside, not wilderness. The Badlands and mesas and desert canyons of North America are, to me, just bare rock: ugly and inimical. Real nature is wood and stream, fenland and shoreline, moor and dell. I like silence, broken by natural sounds: water, birds. Not dogs, can't stand the sound of dogs barking. I like temperate climate, somewhere between 45 and 75.

art
I like sculpture and paintings, but don't much care for mobiles or "installations." If I were Empress of the Universe I'd own a few Tang animals, a bunch of very good paintings (of modern stuff I like April Gornick, Lu Jian Jun and desperately loathe garbage like Damien Hirst), several Roman or Etruscan mosaics, and maybe one or two fabulous woven textiles (tapestries--and I mean tapestry, not embroidery--and carpets).

print journals
(what Kelley and I subcribe to between us)

• The Economist (this is my favourite, hands down)
• Entertainment Weekly
• Diva
• The Gay and Lesbian Review
• The New Yorker
• Creative Screenwriting
• Script
• Archaelogy
• British Archaelogy
• Publishers Weekly
• The Wall Street Journal
• Seattle Post-Intelligencer
• Scientific American
• Poetry

recently read
This is not a list of books I recommend, just what I've read recently. When the mood takes me I'll add more at the bottom of the list.
• Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner (for once we have a girl learning about swordplay who doesn't want to; she'd rather do girl things; pure fun)
• Changeling, by Delia Sherman (this is a nifty portrait of the fairy world of New York's Central Park see through the eyes of a YA changeling--and also her autistic counterpart, the one who got left behind; Sherman's deep love of New York emerges and makes me love it, too)
• Requiem for an Assassin, by Barry Eisler (Rain, the Japanese-American assassin finds love and struggles with himself; lots of cool tradecraft)
• Bad Luck and Trouble, by Lee Child (fun with Jack Reacher, as always, though the fact that he never, ever changes is wearing thin)
• The Blue Sword, and The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley (I re-read these old favourites on the plane last month; they are brilliant; they do everything YA fantasy should; they are old friends who never fail to lift my spirits; if you haven't read them, please do)
• Free Love and Other Stories, by Ali Smith (not as knockdown fabulous as The Other Story and Other Stories; there again, these were written 12 years ago; and don't get me wrong, they're really good)
• The People of the Wind, by Poul Anderson (another re-read, this time seventies SF: winged people and humans learning each others' ways; war between empires; grief and sex--pretty cool, if you can cope with the 70s sex and gender stuff)
• How Not to Write a Screenplay, by Denny Martin Flinn (very, very funny--but slyly so--and most informative; after reading this, I thought, Huh, I can do this, and promptly started a screenplay)
• Ash, by Malinda Lo (this is an unpublished manuscript; I really liked it: the story of Cinderalla, who falls love not with the prince but with a huntress; it's a lovely book: sweet but unflinching--she still has to pay a price for fairy help, sigh; good story, good characters, very satisfying)
• Don't Chew Jesus, by Danielle Schaaf & Michael Prendergast (funny stories about nuns written by their former pupils, also some stories by the nuns themselves; who knew that INRI stands for 'I'm nailed right in!')
• Perfect Circle, by Sean Stewart (Stewart is so good; this is laugh-out-loud funny in places--very southern; all about a man who sees dead people; the ending is just right)
• The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, by, well, by Isidore himself, in a new (i.e. last year) translation from CUP. No, I haven't actually read it yet but it'll be in my sticky little hands by the beginning of next month and I can't *wait*.